Jesse Grider, who kept the peace in America's tense moments, has died

Jesse Grider, the mild-mannered but steadfast former U.S. marshal who kept the peace during some of the tensest moments in 20th century America — from the Montgomery-to-Selma civil rights march to the American Indian seizure of Wounded Knee — died Thursday in Louisville. He was 85.

During 19 years as a federal law enforcement officer, Grider protected school children and the public during vitriolic and sometimes violent anti-busing demonstrations in Little Rock, Arkansas; New Orleans; Boston and Louisville.

During the height of tensions over U.S. District Judge James Gordon’s order to desegregate the schools in Jefferson County, Grider in 1975 was named the 10th U.S. marshal for the Western District Kentucky in 1975 — and the first to come up through the ranks rather than win a political appointment.

The director of the U.S. Marshals Service said nobody was more deserving, and eventually five U.S. attorney generals commended him for his service.

He earned lasting fame in 1960, where demonstrators were rioting in the streets of New Orleans, protesting a school federal desegregation order that local officials said they would defy. Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis threatened to arrest federal law enforcement officials who tried to carry it out.

Grider, who had been on his honeymoon, and three other marshals were assigned to escort a 6-year-old black girl, Ruby Bridges, to school each day. Two marshals walked in front of her and two behind, pelted with eggs each day as they walked past a wall scrawled with a racial epithet and the letters KKK.

The image appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, where popular artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell saw it and transformed it into a painting — "The Problem We All Live With” — that appeared in Look Magazine.

The painting inspired an emotional reunion nearly 30 years later, in 1992, at which the girl, by then 37 and a married mother of four, was reunited with Grider at a black history month celebration in New Orleans.

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Jesse Grider, 1992, holding framed copy of Norman Rockwell's "The Problem We All Live With," which depicts U.S. deputy marshals protecting a 6-year-old girl in New Orleans as she walks to school in 1960.(Photo: Courier Journal)

For the child, Ruby Bridges Hall, it was a healing step in a long odyssey of trying to understand her lonely role in helping integrate the public schools, the Courier Journal wrote at the time. "I know that it happened for a reason, but for a long time, it bothered me,” she said. “I just didn't understand why I had to go through all that. Now I realize it wasn't about my education. It was more about having those doors opened for blacks.”

Grider, who by 1992 had retired from the Marshals Service and was U.S. District Court clerk, said, "You think how much better things are now, but how there's still a long way to go.”

Born in 1932 in Griderville, about 10 miles north of Glasgow, Jesse William Grider joined the National Guard at age 17 and served in the Korean War as a forward observer, then worked as an officer on the Glasgow Police Department for four years.

Joining the Marshals Service in 1958, he was one of 140 deputies sent that year to Little Rock, where President Dwight Eisenhower had also stationed federal troops to enforce a school integration order.

Grider was among the more than 700 marshals ordered into Montgomery, Alabama, in May 1961 by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to protect the safety and civil rights of white and black "Freedom Riders," who were challenging Jim Crow laws that then applied on interstate buses traveling through Alabama.

In 1965, Grider walked all 50 miles of the famed Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, where, he later recalled, he shared coffee and conversation with both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sheriff Jim Clark, the symbol of white resistance.

In May 1971, Grider led a group of marshals in Washington who were part of a much larger force of law officers who arrested more than 12,000 people at the “May Day" anti-Vietnam war protest. And he was with a marshal's special operations group that retook Wounded Knee in 1973 from a group of Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement who had seized and occupied the town on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

During Louisville’s busing crisis, Grider had special reason for concern: His had a 12-year-old daughter who was bused from eastern Jefferson County to a downtown junior high.

"I want to stress the safety of the children," he said. "I don't think the people in Kentucky would disagree with that."

He retired as U.S. marshal in 1977, then served as the chief court clerk for the Western District of Kentucky until 1994.

"The Problem We All Live With," by Norman Rockwell, featured Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old who had to be escorted by marshals to school after New Orleans schools were ordered to desegregate in 1960.(Photo: Courtesy IMG Licensing Worldwide and Rockwell Museum)